The husband and wife team Marthe Péquart and Saint-Just Péquart discovered Téviec and Hoëdic, a similar island site in the local region. The grave finds include shells, shell beads, and bone pins (Péquart et al. 1937; Péquart and Péquart 1954; Taborin 1974). The ubiquity of cowrie, periwinkle, and other shells in the grave goods at Téviec has been interpreted as symbols indicating prestige, especially since the shell species would have been of low importance in the inhabitants’ diet; the midden and study of historical resources point to available red deer, wild boar, and a wide range of marine life for the resident hunter-gatherers to eat (Schulting 1996). Cowrie shells were located often in adult male graves and periwinkle shells in adult female graves. Distribution patterns of the pierced shells led to the inference of shell necklaces and wrist bracelets, such as with the women in Figure 5.1 and in other graves. Shell headwear was suggested by the patterns of shell beads in some graves at the site (341). While no significant difference in the “artefact richness” of adult male and female grave goods is present, male graves contained higher numbers of utilitarian items (342). With shells, the other most common grave goods were flint blades and bone pins (like a stick pin). Burials containing bone pins and abundant grave goods such as cowrie and periwinkle shells, shell beads and flints, and situated with antler structures as seen in Figure 5.1, belonged to high-status individuals.
Figure 5.1 Two women’s skeletons, protected by antler. Tomb of Téviec. Recovery in 1938 restoration 2010. Didier Descouens, photographer. Museum of Toulouse. Licensed by Creative Commons. License available online: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The grave goods include funeral jewelry made of marine shells drilled and assembled into necklaces, bracelets, and anklets.
Schulting explained that clothing is “one of the earliest-appearing and most effective means of communicating differences in status” (346). Clothing at Hoëdic and Téviec is inferred through the presence of single bone pins approximately five inches long “found placed on the chest in a manner suggesting garment fasteners” in burials with rich grave goods (346). No fibers or fragments of clothing survive; however, the long pins could have held a garment closed around the body. Dress also serves as a marker of group identity, a function facilitated by the distinction of the bone pins at each location; bone pins at Hoëdic were created from red deer antler and at Téviec they were crafted of wild boar bone (348). At Téviec, the abundance of shell beads attested to status distinctions among the twenty-three burials there, and also indicated distinction in the symbols associated with adult males and females.
While fashion demonstrated by change cannot be assigned to the late Mesolithic Era culture in Brittany with the limited evidence available, the fashion impulse may be assumed. In the pierced shells and their distribution patterns (by the skull, neck, and wrists) we recognize the urge to embellish the human body with shell bead jewelry. In the divergent materials used for the bone pins at Téviec and Hoëdic we recognize distinction of one group from another. The processes of comparison, emulation, and differentiation noted by Cannon to be present in most cultures were in place.
The earliest evidence of modern humans creating decorative elements to wear, of the urge to decorate the body, comes from Africa in the form of shell beads. As noted in Chapter 3, a cave find of Nassarius shells at the Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt in Morocco pushed the date of human-pierced shell beads, and thus of human symbolic behavior in personal ornamentation, to approximately 110,000 years ago (Barton et al. 2009). The trove of pierced shells resembles at least four other similar but more recent finds in Morocco as well as a find with the same shell species in South Africa, indicating a wide dispersal of modern humans at this time (University of Oxford 2009).
The oldest beads in the Middle East, also pierced shells, were found at Ksar Akil in Lebanon, and date to 41,000–35,000 years ago. This date range matches the date of the arrival of modern humans in Europe and therefore holds importance in tracing human movement out of Africa (Douka et al. 2013). The find at Ksar Akil includes ten pierced snail shell beads and one larger clamshell-like Glycymeris shell that is pierced at the shell’s hinge edge. Together the shells create a necklace with the Glycymeris shell as a pendant centered between the ten snail shells. The composition indicates a fashion impulse—a composition that moves beyond a series of the same shell as at Taforalt—that indicates change in style over time. The necklace, found near a young female skeleton, affirms the urge to decorate the body 30 millennia prior to the date of the Téviec shell jewelry.
In addition to their role in understanding human movement out of Africa, beads are significant as evidence in the development of techniques used to make things. Humans certainly had already made beads or jewelry from many other natural materials besides shell. Nuts, seeds, flowers, and fruits are good materials for jewelry, if temporary ones. Since these materials are highly perishable, little evidence survives of such ornaments. An exception is Egyptian floral collars (1320 BCE) that provide insight into the ways jewelry can be crafted from plant materials (Winlock and Arnold 2010: 58–63, 73–74). Even before these Bronze Age examples of plant-based jewelry, humans created beads from ostrich shells, stones, clay, glass, and eventually metals. Each subsequent material reflects advancement in technology, and the composite materials attest to increasing knowledge (Liu 2010). New bead materials that arrive to a locale by trade and exchange provide groups with novel colors and texture and in this way stimulate the desire for fashion change. For the archaeologist, beads that are not locally made serve in the tracing of cross-cultural contact.
An important find in bead history is the graves at Sungir, Russia, dated to 32,050–28,550 BCE (Trinkaus et al. 2014). Mastodon tusk beads laid with the skeletons of an adult male and two adolescents in three graves number over 13,000. The beads lay in patterns that implied garment shapes, for example, leggings or trousers and sleeves or arm covers. The clothing had been highly embellished with the handcrafted ivory beads. While this isolated find cannot attest to fashion change, the beads demonstrate a drive to decorate that resulted in time and material investment.
Marking the body with tattooing or scarification may be as old as shell beads jewelry, but the record does not provide reliable and direct evidence dated before approximately 3200 BCE. That is the date of Otzi the Iceman found in the Alps in 1991 in a thawing glacier. While his discovery captured the world’s attention, tattoos on his mummified skin stimulated much discussion in popular imagination. Experts interpret his body markings—lines and dots on his back and knees—as therapy for strains and sprains. Prior to his discovery, the oldest known tattoos were those adorning female mummies in the tomb of priestess Amunet from the Egyptian Bronze Age (ca. 2000 BCE). Their tattoos, located on their thighs and abdomens, are associated with fertility and childbirth according to Joanne Fletcher (Lineberry 2007).
Many of the known prehistoric tattoos are interpreted similarly, that is, to serve an amuletic purpose such as protection or empowerment through the placement or pattern of the tattoo. Body marking including temporary designs made with media such as clay, pollen, and minerals probably preceded clothing. Some of the earliest indications of tattoo practices come from tools that survive, such as stone and bone reservoirs for marking media and associated sharp needles for penetrating the skin. Examples of these were found by the Péquarts in the Pyrenees at Grotte du Mas d’Azil dating to the Upper Paleolithic Era. The find included types of sharp bone needles, some with eyes for non-tattooing uses and others without eyes and with a longitudinal groove to hold the marking media; ochre, also found in the cache, could have been the media used with the grooved needles (Péquart and Péquart 1960). The impulse to decorate the body in prehistoric times extended globally: tattoos are attested across Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Pacific (Gilbert 2000). Despite the lack of evidence, we assume that decorating the body with temporary and permanent markings was a universal human urge. Some textile specialists believe that tattoos moved off human skin a
nd onto cloth by way of embroidered designs to protect certain parts of the body believed to stimulate fertility (Paine 1990: 7).
We are not alone in linking archaeological finds to the fashion process. Diana DiPaolo Loren studied archaeological material culture along with archival sources to determine how Americans framed their identities in colonial times. In her analysis of sartorial expression, she used the word “fashion” to explain the mixed dress styles evident in her sources. She argued that colonization of the Americas did not result in straightforward adoption of European fashion by indigenous groups, but rather in creation of mixed or hybrid dress styles (Loren 2012: 109). Individuals, she explained, created their own “colonial identities at the intersection of taste, fashion, and sumptuary laws” (Loren 2010: 32).
In the following sections, we offer examples of fashion systems among indigenous peoples in the Americas before and after European colonization. Examples include Native Americans of southern New England and the indigenous peoples of Meso- and South America. Loren’s argument for interpreting post–Contact sartorial expression as hybridization rather than wholesale adoption of Western dress is germane to the discussion.
Fashion systems among southern New England’s Native Americans
Tribes in northeastern North America existed apart from Europe’s fashion system prior to the sixteenth century. The Contact Period for southern New England spans the years after Europeans made the first documented contact with New England’s tribes until King Philip’s War began in 1675. The Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first to provide a written account of the customs and habits of the Native Americans he encountered along the Atlantic coastline from Maine to North Carolina in 1524 (Wroth 1970). It is probable that European fishermen had traded with New England tribes prior to that date, although no written documents exist (Brasser 1978).
This brings us to the issue of documentation. Historians rely on written documents for evidence. For sources about the Indians of New England, this includes explorers’ accounts from the sixteenth century when European monarchs sponsored expeditions to the New World; merchants’ records such as those of William Pynchon, who operated a trading post in present-day Springfield, Massachusetts; and early English colonists’ ethno-historical writings whose detai led descriptions were meant to interest others in emigrating to New England. Natives, on the other hand, depended on oral histories that are not written down; they are transmitted from generation to generation by tribal elders. This is problematic for historians, who favor the written word over legend. Another problem is that organic materials from which apparel is constructed do not survive in archaeological contexts, that is, unless they are in a microenvironment that allows preservation (e.g., near metal). New England’s extreme temperature and moisture changes from the cold winters to wet summers are inhospitable to textiles.
Few images of northeastern North America’s indigenous peoples from the early Contact Period exist. The most reliable are John White’s watercolors of the Algonquian-speaking tribes of North Carolina. Painted in 1585, they are invaluable records of the appearance of Native Americans in the early Contact Period. Theodore de Bry as well as Cesare Vecellio later copied these images.
Some burials accidentally discovered in New England have been excavated, which provides evidence beyond the written descriptions of the aforementioned European explorers and early colonists. One of the authors of this book, Linda Welters, has been involved in analyzing textiles from two Contact Period Native American burial grounds and a third post–Contact Period site (Welters et al. 1996; Welters and Ordoñez 2004).
The first site is known as RI-1000, a Narragansett burial ground located in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. The excavation of the remains and associated grave goods of fifty-six individuals took place in 1982 after accidental disturbance by a bulldozer prior to retail development. Based on the analysis of the grave goods, the site was dated 1650–70, decades after trading posts had been established in the area, but prior to the Great Swamp fight in 1675, which decimated the Narragansetts’ numbers.
The second site, another burial ground, is called Long Pond. It is located on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation, which was established in 1666. The site, consisting of twenty-one individuals, was accidentally discovered in 1990 while digging a house foundation near Ledyard, Connecticut. The date range assigned to the site is 1670–720. After analysis, all remains and grave goods were reburied.
The third site is in Mashpee on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, home to Wampanoag Indians. The undated remains of two individuals were discovered in fill dirt from house construction in 1990. Welters and her colleague Margaret Ordoñez were contracted to analyze the many textile fragments associated with the burials and to suggest a possible date.
It is challenging to decipher fashion systems among the indigenous groups in New England because the chronology is not continuous, just as Cannon and Craik observed. Gaps in knowledge exist, resulting in dependence on accounts by early explorers and colonists, who viewed Indians as uncivilized. Some of these writers spent much time with Native Americans, so their accounts are considered reliable despite their prejudices.
Here is what we do know. When Europeans arrived, the tribes of southern New England wore “skins of beasts as deer, moose, beaver, otters, rackoons, foxes, and other wild creatures” (Gookin [1792] 1970: 17). They processed skins by scraping the flesh and softening them with oils. The hair was sometimes left on, particularly when the skins were intended for use during the winter. Natives were very particular about the deer tails being left on, as they considered “defaced” any skin with a missing tail (Morton [1637] 1969: 30). The skins and pelts were not cut or tailored to the body as were the fashions of the Europeans; this inspired comment and comparison to the “wild Irish” and other people considered “primitive” and “uncivilized” because they did not tailor (e.g., cut and sew) their apparel. Native Americans also revealed parts of the body that Europeans covered up. This prompted use of descriptors such as “naked” and “nude,” or as William Wood put it, they dressed “only in Adam’s livery” ([1635], 1977: 82).
Europeans loved furs, and made good money trading beads and cloth for furs. However, the furs and skins worn by Europeans were always tailored or manipulated in some way so that the end product did not resemble the source. Beaver pelts were processed by shaving the fur and mixing it with wool for the fashionable beaver hats worn by kings as well as commoners. Constance Snow’s beaver hat, dated 1615–40, is material evidence of the popularity of these hats among the Pilgrims; it is housed in the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Furs were used to line coats and trim garments in Europe, which contrasted with the untailored furs worn by New England’s indigenous peoples. Samuel de Champlain commented that “you can see the flesh under the arm-pits, because they have not the ingenuity to fit them better” ([1604–18] 1907: 55). The Indian footwear known as moccasins did involve sewing. Some styles were ankle height while others were knee high, similar to leggings, which provided protection while walking through underbrush. Sometimes they were decorated. Europeans admired Indian footwear because it was comfortable, noiseless, and could be wrung out and “hang’d up in their chimney” to dry (Williams [1643] 1936: 120). In contrast, European cobbled shoes squeaked and creaked in the forest, and did not lend themselves well to hours of walking through the woods.
Adult men and women always wore a breech clout, an apron-like garment that covered their “secret parts” (Gookin 1970: 17). Young girls wore them too, but boys did not don them until puberty. Natives wore skins or pelts over one or both shoulders; they also slept under them. Some skins intended for mantles were decorated with embroidered or painted borders. Thomas Morton described how the painted borders were made, which he likened to the “lace set on by a Taylor” . . . “in workes of severall fashions very curious, according to the severall fantasies of the workemen, wherein they strive to excell one another” (Morton [1637] 1969: 29). Here we see something akin
to a cohort of artisans creating designs from their own imaginations rather than being bound by tradition.
One curiously worked garment that Native Americans esteemed as much as Europeans valued velvet was the turkey feather cloak (Williams [1643] 1936: 119). Two references mention these as fashioned for children (Josselyn [1674] 1988; Ward 1699). Older men and women made turkey feather coats, “which they weave together with twine of their owne makinge, very prittily” (Morton [1637] 1969: 28). These short capes were worn over the shoulder and under the arm.
Europeans commented on the Indians’ adornment of body and hair with great interest. Samuel de Champlain, who visited Cape Cod in 1605, saw “a girl with her hair very neatly dressed, with a skin colored red, and bordered on the upper part with little shell beads. A part of her hair hung down behind, the rest braided in various ways” (Champlain [1604–18] 1907: 73). Indians’ dark hair was oiled and carefully dressed on a daily basis. Sometimes it was dyed. William Wood gave a detailed description that incorporates Craik’s fashion impulse: “Sometimes they wear it long, hanging down in a loose, disheveled womanish manner; others tied up hard and short like a horse tail, bound close with a fillet. . . . Other cuts they have as their fancy befools them, which would torture the wits of a curious barber to imitate” (Wood [1635] 1977: 83) (see Figure 5.2). While some styles marked affiliation with a particular tribe or signified status within a tribe, the descriptions reveal that hairstyles were personal choices and that quite a few people displayed pride in their individual appearance. Indeed, as Roger Williams observed: “Pride appeares in any colour” ([1643] 1936: 165).
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